Our humanity has failed us in Gaza

A girl is carried from the carnage, her face invisible behind a mask of blood. The walls of the playground where she died are spattered red, and the floor is littered with shredded clothing. In a second UN schoolyard, children's bodies lie sliced like meat by falling shells.

These tableaux marked the height of the massacre in Gaza. The 40 civilian corpses were barely cold when Israel announced that it would lift its attack for three hours a day, in the first indicator that the slaughter might be reaching endgame. Israeli aggression follows a calculated pattern. Attack until global opinion becomes too restive, then do a deal.

This allows a generous helping of killing time. As the tension began to ease yesterday, more than 600 civilians had perished in Gaza while European leaders bickered and wrung their hands. The faces of the dead are a pale reproach to a world that has erased a groundrule of humanity: we have forgotten how to condemn.

Israel has attracted much sympathy from those who don't buy the argument that there is anything disproportionate in its response to Hamas aggression. Some westerners have gazed at images of limp bodies as if they are the mortal remains of some lesser breed of child.

This response is not born of war fatigue or compassion deficit. It marks the passing of an age of certainty. The Bush presidency, with only days left to run, took the Manichean view that the world was an endless battle between the forces of pure good and those of pure evil. All human events could be seen through the prism of a philosophy devised in the third century BC and applied by a modern president beside whom the Prophet Isaiah looked pragmatic.

Iraq, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay were all by-products of a mindset that any action, no matter how brutal or immoral, is justified because it is being done by the righteous in the name of virtue. Under that credo, the horrors that can be perpetrated by a "good" state on an "evil" one are almost limitless.

With the US economy in crisis and a $300 billion tax cut to force through, a Middle East peace process is already being talked of as a second-term issue. In the absence of outrage, only the LibDem leader, Nick Clegg, has urged Britain and Europe to impose an arms embargo on Israel and accused Gordon Brown of sitting on his hands and speaking like an accountant